So Denise was up in Whangarei and had been staying for a week and a half and was about to load up the car on last Wednesday morning to come back home and disaster! The car was not there and had simply vanished!

Not ideal in any circumstance. There were no rental cars available from Whangarei and flights were expensive and not convenient so a phone call to the police was still the first option.

The good news was the Police called within a couple of hours and had located the car which was stuck in mud next to a lake in a small town called Hikurangi which was 17 kms north of Whangarei. It appears the thieves had broken one of the small back windows, got into the car, smashed the ignition and nicked off with it.

The good news is there wasn’t too much damage and the car was still in a drive-able condition albeit with the assistance of a common kitchen knife to turn the car off and on. Other damage was mud left inside the vehicle, a dent and various scratches on the boot and obviously damage to the key ignition system.

We only had 3rd party insurance on the car, so it might cost $200-$300 for repairs to get it back up to scratch. Still an inconvenience either way …

Clearly the criminals involved had no sense of style as this was not the sort of car anyone would want to be seen in! Thank goodness for mud eh?

New Zealand is supposed to be the 2nd safest country in the world – this doesn’t say much for the rest of the countries on the planet 🙁

As this blog is fairly new, new content is required in order to keep it going so it was time to write a new article. At the point of logging in I wasn’t sure what to write about and then it was staring me right in the face … 261 items of spam attempted as comments onto the site … Grrrr!

Although the internet is a fantastic tool, junk mail is not and dodgy marketers have literally a free reign at attempting to market anything and everything simply by the press of a button to unsuspecting sites. Gone are the good old days of junk mail filling up your letterbox …

Fortunately I can’t read Russian or Chinese – I’m not in the need of a “sexy” time, the latest 100x your money through Crypto scheme or assistance with expressing myself through the English language – so at this stage I’ll pass on all the wonderful offers available.

Thanks to the way the open source community have evolved and improved wordpress – 100% of these comments were stopped from going through automatically and were easily removed with the simple press of a button … Poof! Gone!

The goal of this site is to assist people with saving money, getting more for less and learning how to improve peoples lives through better money management. We will achieve that goal no matter how small the impact we make!

Goodbye spam. We briefly enjoyed your comments but our relationship has come to a quick end 😉

Welcome to Project Frugal!

If you have begun to follow our story, you know that our family is dedicated to frugal living and we are taking steps to achieve FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early). We are also looking to grow as much of our own food as possible from wherever we might live …

In our videos we share ways to live frugally, make money, save money, and invest money – to inspire you to pursue financial independence and less reliance on the 9 to 5 daily grind …

Our goal is to share our experiences with you, so that you can learn from them and so that you can also successfully pursue financial independence …

So, what are you waiting for? Join us and start that Frugal FIRE journey!